Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

Avaya Enterprise Technology Forum, Monte Carlo, 4-7 March

We are getting ready for our main annual networking event in EMEA, the 2013 Avaya Enterprise Technology Forum (AETF). This year it will be hosted from a very nice venue in Monte Carlo. The European crisis can have its advantages, we found out when searching for a venue. Also this year, we will showcase our current and future capabilities, and we will share a lot of our vision with our main partners and customers. For me and our networking core team, it is a highlight of the year. Maybe even a small ego trip for our engineers, being able to demo and talk about the crème de la crème of what solutions we can deliver with our networking portfolio. This year we will put emphasis on end-to-end solutions to show the value of Avaya-on-Avaya solutions. Of course this all starts with the planning and stress of building up the event. Will we get all equipment shipped and delivered in one piece and on time? Can we get the intended demo to work with that early alpha software version that is planned for release next year, so you can get a sneak peek of the future? Luckily, this year’s AETF is almost a home game, Monte Carlo is only a 50 minutes drive from our main EMEA networking core engineering team site in Valbonne..a promising thought.

AETF means opportunity. An opportunity for everyone at the event. It is an opportunity to talk with the thought leaders of our company. And an opportunity to exchange your thoughts with them, but also with other partners and customers from EMEA, provide and receive feedback about the daily practice you live in, using Avaya Networking. Of course, the intent of the event is to deliver value to our customers and partners, but Avaya gains also a lot of insight from the one to one discussions with you. It allows us to build better solutions or set the right development priorities. This little video sums it up nicely In the end it is also an opportunity to meet new people, learn new things and potentially new roads into the Avaya Networking organization, that help you run your networking operation better than before the event. The vibrance, buzz and mostly unanimous enthusiasm we meet at these events affirm that Avaya is doing the right thing on the technology and vision level. Not only to ourselves, but also to our partners and customers that have once taken the step to choose for Avaya Networking.

But come to think of that, looking at it from a 10.000 ft. perspective, it is kind of special that you chose for Avaya in the first place, to build the foundation of your communications infrastructure with. In our industry that is dominated by one, maybe two brands, real marketing power houses that create the trends and steer the opinion of customers and partners in the “right” direction. Getting our message across in such an environment is extremely difficult. Only few people take the time to take an unbiased look further than the preset boundaries gracefully set up by our competitors. To choose Avaya that dares to have a different opinion than the main stream, a rightful claimer of leadership in various areas. How can it be that Avaya comes up with these innovations? Are the giants asleep? Is it all down to heritage, because we stem from an age where the Silicon Valley was still a green valley? Is it the talented people we apparently attract and retain? Maybe a bit of everything…

And we do it again – against the mainstream – where most vendors created proprietary fabric solutions, Avaya bets on an open IEEE Standard to differentiate itself? We constantly dare to set ourselves apart from the main stream, and apparently only few people have the skill, vision to see the value and audacity to set foot on this unknown territory completely against the communis opinion. Just like the gold seekers that went to the Wild West looking for fortune, ignoring the warnings from their friends and family of a tough life and small chance of success. You are the gold seekers of our time. As with the early gold seekers, apparently they were successful enough to start the Gold Rush. Just maybe, you will start off another gold rush. When will it start? No one knows. Hopefully early March after our AETF, when you return home with pots of networking gold.

Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.